Musings on art and modern audiences

A Streetcar Named Desire : Reading plays, watching plays Revisiting literature offers us a chance to impart new perspectives and insights - that’s not a revolutionary idea but it’s an important one. Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire is a play close to my heart, and one for which I think I will always reserve the label “Genius.” In part I wonder if it’s because I spent so long poring over it, picking at the bones for every detail in word choice or staging or soundscape. Streetcar is one of those stories which haunts you. Not necessarily because you can really empathise with the characters but because their troubles are so complex, difficult, and entwined that you feel you can’t let go of them. Part of the problem is Williams. If he wasn’t so good at writing maybe we wouldn’t care so much; alas, he’s rather brilliant. Previously I’ve made the case for stories which have made for excellent adaptations, where adaptation has breathed new life into a text rather than dulling its...

  Young Frankenstein : Gothic comic Since we’ve been enjoying the spooky season, I felt it would be a missed opportunity not to post about a spooky film at some point. (Please forgive the hiatus on blogs recently, life has been hellishly busy.)  Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is one of my favourite novels ever, and is also helpfully a quintessential example of Gothic horror. It doesn’t just contain all the hallmarks of a great Gothic story, it originated many of them: a dark, stormy night in autumn, mad scientists, communes with dead bodies, messing about with the natural world, the horrifying prospect of having our morality questioned, all the usual stuff. Don't take that as discounting all of the very serious and necessary questions which Frankenstein asks us to think about, just as acknowledgment that it makes iconic the Gothic genre and its aesthetic of the strange, the terrifying and the macabre.  So what happens when we make it a comedy? Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstei...