Just completed O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Not his absolute best, but inherently powerful storyline which works despite the melodramatic elements - perhaps because of them? Can't imagine it staged though. And isn't it odd that despite his being so thoroughly a man of the theatre O'Neill writes such impossible stage directions? Where do you find three actors who look like they really do belong to the same family for the three key roles? I suppose the most a director can do is attempt to get close to what was going on in the dramatist's fevered imagination and hope the audience succumbs to the same fever.
Actually I meant to read the three plays that make up Mourning a while back, but I got side-tracked by a variety of other enticing items. I'm in that sort of mood in which almost everything I open grabs my attention, at least for a short while and I've sort of surrendered to that, at least for the time being. But I've decided to give my reading of Don Paterson's entertaining commentary on Shakespeare's sonnets a bit of necessary discipline. I raced through his comments on the first thirty sonnets and realised I wasn't actually focusing on the sonnets themselves, just the commentary. So I forced myself to stop, pulled my favourite edition of the sonnets off the shelf - this being the one edited by John Kerrigan in the New Penguin Shakespeare, which contains extremely detailed notes on each poem - and started at the beginning, reading each sonnet in detail, then Kerrigan's notes, then Paterson's comments, and then the sonnet again. I can only manage two sonnets a day this way, but at least it feels like I'm really reading them, rather than using them as a kind of background music.
I've got a fair amount of other stuff on the boil as well, too much really. Business as usual, I suppose.
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