Things We Do for Love

Things We Do for Love is a play written by Alan Ayckbourn. This is a two-act play, with the settings in sections of three flats at 56 Bloom Street, London.

Gilbert, Hamish, Nikki and Barbara are in an early Victorian terrace house which is divided into three flats on different floors. To one side, the front door from the street leads to a small hallway with stairs up to the first floor flat and another flight down to the basement flat. There is a front door leading off this hallway to Barbara's ground-floor apartment.

In view in Barbara's flat is the main sitting room. Leading from the living room are three further doors: one to the bedroom, one to the bathroom, and one to a small, galley-style kitchen. Upstairs, we can see part of the corresponding flat above Barbara's. However, our view of this is cut off at about knee level. This is therefore the view we are afforded of any occupant. We can see a carpet, the legs of a bedstead, chairs and tables.

Downstairs in the basement, below Barbara, we can see even less of Gilbert's flat. A foot or so of the ceiling of his bedsitting room is all that is visible, together with the top of a step-ladder supporting a trestle.

Gilbert is in love with Barbara. He painted an enormous nude picture of Barbara on the ceiling of his flat. Nikki attended St Gertrude School together with Barbara. They had not seen each other for 10 years but Nikki said that Barbara is her best friend. Both of them sang their school anthem various times in the play. The song was about girls being strong and independent. Nikki and Hamish moved into Barbara's apartment and occupied the top floor while waiting for their new home to be furnished. Hamish is a vegetarian. Barbara openly criticizes Hamish's tie and tells Nikki and Hamish that she thinks men who are vegetarians are wimps. Still she fell in love with Hamish. There were two love scenes between Barbara and Hamish, one in Hamish and Nikki's flat, and the other at Barbara's flat. There was also a serious fight, ending with broken limbs and head injury, between Hamish and Barbara.

A very funny story. We never can tell what attracts people. The most unlikely ones can become lovers. 

Structuralism

Culturalism takes meaning to be its central category and casts it as the product of active human agents. By contrast, structuralism speaks of signifying practices that generate meaning as an outcome of structures or predictable regularities that lie outside of any given person. Structuralism searches for the constraining patterns of culture and social life which lie outside of any given person. Individual acts are explained as the product of social structures. As such, structuralism is anti-humanist in its decentring of human agents from the heart of enquiry. Instead it favours a form of analysis in which phenomena have meaning only in relation to other phenomena within a systematic structure of which no particular person is the source. A structuralist understanding of culture is concerned with the 'systems of relations' of an underlying structure (usually language) and the grammar that makes meaning possible.

An Introduction to Cultural Studies, 3rd Ed, Chris Baker, SAGE Publications Ltd.,  Pg 15.

Notes from the Underground

I was a coward and a slave. I say this without the slightest embarrassment.  Every decent man of our age must be a coward and a slave.This is his normal condition. Of that I am firmly persuaded. He is made and constructed to that very end. And not only at the present time owing to some casual circumstances, but always, at all times, a decent man is bound to be a coward and a slave. It is the law of nature for all decent people all over the earth, If any one of them happens to be valiant about something, he need not be comforted nor carried away by that; he would cower just the same before something else. That is how it invariably and inevitably ends


Notes from the Underground, Part II, Chapter 1.  Dostoevsky.

Tess of the d'Urbervilles

From Chapter 35. After Tess told Angel her part.

Behold, when thy face is made bare, he that loved thee shall hate;
Thy face shall be no more fair at the fall of thy fate.
For thy life shall fall as a leaf and be shed as the rain;
And the veil of thine head shall be grief, and the crown shall be pain.

Review of "All My Sons"

I was at the opening performance of "All My Son" at DBS Art Centre. This is a play written by Arthu Miller, and the play is produced by Open Stage.

The synopsis at the SISTIC ticketing website says, "Where denial ends the truth begins". Everyone in the Keller family has, at the back of their mind, a suspicion that Joe is responsible for Larry's death, but they clinged on to the belief, "No, that couldn't be". After all, Larry Keller didn't ride in the kind of war plane that Joe manufactured in his factory. Mrs Keller was obsessed with the miracle that her elder son, Larry, would walk in through the door one day. "God wouldn't have let a father kill his son." Her obsession became an obstacle to her younger son, Chris, who wished to marry Annie, who was engaged to Larry. Chris and Annie both believed that Larry was dead. It had been three years since the body was reported missing. Mrs Keller was open in her view that their being together was a betrayal to Larry and herself.

Annie's brother, George, turned up at the Keller's family, to stop Annie's engagement to Chris. George told Annie that he had visited his own father, who supervised the war plane production at Joe Keller's factory. George's father was in jail for letting faulty airplanes be delivered to the military. The planes had crashed, killing 21 pilots. George's father claimed that Keller had given him the order, but Keller had denied it. Both Annie and George had ignored their father in the past three years, ashamed of his "crime", but George finally believed his father after visiting him in prison.

George sought the truth from Keller, who continued to deny it. Annie, despite her doubt, decided to leave with Chris. Annie produced the letter written by Larry before his disappearance and let Mrs Keller read it. It was clear from the letter that Larry committed suicide because he believed that his father had let the defective planes to be flown in the air. All the Kellers were devastated at the revelation.

Too late, Chris realized that it may be better for the truth to be hidden. The deep love the family member has for one another deepens the despair when they lost the respect for each other. Joe Keller's life is his family, but all that he had done for his family had not been appreciated by Chris. Chris believes that there is a world out there that everyone has to be responsible to, and he is disillusioned that all the sufferings and sacrifices in the war were easily forgotten as people went on with life making money and taking care of the bread and butter business only. No one's value and priority in life are wrong, but when one's loved one does not understand the same value, conflict arises, and in this drama, leading to broken life.

Gossip takes over

In Scene VI of Doubt, a play written by John Patrick Shanley, Father Brendan Flynn told this story: A woman was gossiping with her friend about a man they hardly knew - I know none of you have ever done this - and that night, she had a dream. A great hand appeared over her, and pointed down at her. She was immediately seized with an overwhelming sense of guilt. The next day, she went to confession. She got the old parish priest, Father O'Rourke, and she told him the whole thing. "Is gossiping a sin?" she asked the old man. "Was that the Hand of God Almighty pointing a finger at me? Should I be asking your absolution? Father, tell me, have I done something wrong?" "Yes!" Father O'Rourke answered her. "Yes, you ignorant, badly brought-up female! You have borne false witness against your neighbor, you have played fast and loose with his reputation, and you should be heartily ashamed!" So the woman said she was sorry and asked for forgiveness. "Not so fast!" says O'Rourke. "I want you to go home, take a pillow up on your roof, cut it open with a knife, and return here to me!" So she went home, took the pillow off her bed, a knife from the drawer, went up the fire escape to the roof, and stabbed the pillow. Then she went back to the old priest as instructed. "Did you cut the pillow with the knife?" he says. "Yes, Father." "And what was the result?" "Feathers," she said. "Feathers?" he repeated. "Feathers, everywhere, Father!" "Now I want you to go back and gather up every last feather the flew out on the wind!" "Well," she says, "it can't be done. I don't know where they went. The wind took them all over." "And that," said Father O'Rourke, "is gossip!" In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost, Amen.

Blood ties

The child comes home and the parent puts the hooks in him. The old man, or the woman, as the case may be, hasn't got anything to say to the child. All he wants is to have that child sit in a chair for a couple of hours and then go off to bed under the same roof. It's not love. I am not saying that there is not such a thing as love. I am merely pointing to something which is different from love but which sometimes go by the name of love. It may well be that without this thing which I am talking about there would not be any love. But this thing in itself is not love. It is just something in the blood. It is a kind of blood greed, and it is the fate of a man. It is the thing which man has which distinguishes him from the happy brute creation. When you get born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a hame trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can't get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can. And the good old family reunion, with picnic dinner under the maples, is very much like diving into the octopus tank at the aquarium.
-- Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men