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Naomi Number One talks down her first position on Number Two, doubling back on her doppelgänger claim, to reveal it is more of a psychological condition most westerners have: furiously focusing on an Other to hide one’s own guilt over how well things have been in one world thanks to the suffering of many more un-oneself. She pushes for an all-encompassing empathy but settles on flipping the script in the epilogue.

The gap is closing from when I started a Dickens novel and when I am able to stagger to its end. Perhaps by the time I get around to David Copperfield I’ll be able to read it within a year! Not that I cannot guess what will happen based on the Dombey example: families are reunited, a few lessons learned while the enemies to such stability are summarily shut out and forgotten by the final chapter.

Gathering up all the snippets of dialogue that demonstrate Stoppard’s gifts for gab and gags, one has to wonder if it were not better to read through all the early plays and a problematic novel (for my first read at least) to get a better sense of where Hunter is going. Yet the sixth chapter clearly presents the literary world as travesties, using the playwright’s position as a Moon with bits of Malquistian Boot.

Glad that Jung found so much to say about Zosimos and Paracelsus as I must admit reading these two chapters back-to-back made both alchemical authors elucidate similarly. Probably an occupational hazard of such study in esoterica that it makes one seems like they know more than is commonly understood about mystical processes, extending to people like me writing about Jung’s interpretation of Dorn inquiring into …

This is mainly an exploration of German theatre that attempts to blur the line (or rather the Brechtian wall) between performer and spectator. Yet this mostly unfamiliar territory with hardly any Shakespeare, Stoppard or even Brecht’s stagecraft still offers a glimpse of the world where European unity is uncertain, how dominant and othered roles could easily reverse, and dramatic action is mostly radical reaction.

As intriguing as the shining relationship between Dan and Abby might be, minus the age difference and worries about being baited for jail, they need each other to undo centuries of damage done by the True Knot. Rose and her ancient team have other things to worry about: the unexpected gift given to them in the baseball boy’s steam. Who knew that the unvaccinated would play such a heroic role in a prepandemic novel.

With a breezy introduction to Stoppard himself in the opening chapter, Biography, the focus shifts to the author, Hunter, as fanboy: hard not to picture him belly down on a rug, typing his impressions of each play while surrounded by playscripts, press clippings and reviews spread across the floor. There is an attempt to psychologize the playwright with his own words but the mysteries of his mind keep Hunter hunting.

So, an outline of Jung’s fascinating ideas about synchronicity and the shadow is all we’re going to get for the rest of this book. Instead, Klein brings to the forefront a problematic novelist Philip Roth to back up her claims that the Mirror World is a cracked representation of reality. Even with the details of Hans Asperger and his infamous turn, her discussion just reflects fascism bad. So who are the normies?

Great respect for the monk and his insightful way of keeping a clean house and enlightened soul, but his business sense of preaching to the Zen Buddhist choir is a bit off as there are probably not many monks who go about buying books or attach to such worldly things. For a general reader on the other hand, the simple antiquated items and the mantra of Always Be Cleaning seem as much of an imposssible goal as satori.

Fascinating yet frustrating look at recent history and the uncanny effect a couple of misguided memes can cause for an Internet-connected society and one author trying to understand and undo the damage caused by by her doppelgänger. Klein doesn’t miss a beat looking through the looking glass at an unfamiliar face that nevertheless has assumed her identity. Surprisingly close to home until we left the city in 2022.

Dan’s life begins to settle down a decade into sobriety and he takes on the titular doctorally name. Not only Dan but the whole story, Abra included, has become a bit more mellow as the plot catches up with the Obama presidency (no off-hand nickname for this seemingly tranquil era, perhaps King’s better judgment) until a boy named Brad gets picked up by the True Knot. These soul-sucking goons are also drying out.

With all the hints about The Wizard of Oz scattered around the story, I thought that the escape to Emerald City would have been more of a return to “no place like home.” Instead, the remaining four (two sets of complementary colours) deal justly with the Purple enclave before setting out to Somewhere Else and into an allusion to a Shakespeare play also the Huxley novel that both work as a fitting finish.

The outing in Vermillion was heading in one oddly familiar direction with the races, betting and forced breeding. Then suddenly takes a sharp right turn into a peripeteia that instantly cancels all the East Carmine concerns. Perhaps Vermillion will be a more accepting place for all those abandoned there but I have a hunch that Resettlement Bureau is just another trap waiting to be sprung on the unsuspecting refugees.

Sudden changes in the council and bed chambers put Eddie in an elevated but not enviable position. He now is much closer to the inner workings of his prefecture but has little direct influence over events, even as the husband of the newly installed Head Prefect Violet. Made less influential with even more menial tasks like solving a jigsaw puzzle or making purple babies. Like his dad, however, he and Jane have moves.

The narrative is as dull as the dreary northwest states where the Parsons family resides, focusing on the family events leading up to a bank robbery being told in a before and after manner. The chess-playing, bee-keeping son Dell tells his family history with the same exacting passion he gives to his other hobbies. Just like the robbery itself, I refuse to believe that Dell with twin sister Berner ever get to Canada.

A few more details about the Previous are revealed with an ulterior motive by the Pale Rider Hanson, expecting Jane and Eddie to die shortly after hearing the news of the old world. Still much in the midst of this mystery despite some of the surveillance technology and bizarre conformity rules starting to make sense. At least it is world with bits of literature, a colour-coded meritocracy with a trace of Jane Austen.

So the faux-Shakespeare tragedy of Chromatically Non-compliant and Clearly Idiotic star-crossed lovers was just a cover the Tangerine Players give out in order to perform the real thing for a better-informed audience. The playful title of this book may indeed capture the conscience of someone who knows of the Previous’ ways in a too distant world that resembled a map of RISK and has riskier rules to break.

A narrative feat of dexterity to make the necessary connections to Shades of Grey while moving ahead with the present story. Some parts meaningful like Eddie’s marriage of chromatic convenience, other parts mysterious like the Fallen Man being a woman, with small pockets of silliness such as the ban on the number 73 that might end up being an important feature of this book or almost certainly the next one.

Apart from a vaguely-remembered viewing of The Shining and a much more engaged screening of its sequel, there is not much to connect with either the original novel and its sequel (other than the author’s loathing of Kubrick’s classic that prompted King to write this novel). For my first foray in King’s endless oeuvre, it is not bad although a repeated tendency for perverse trauma as inciting incidents.

One thing I am particularly paying attention to as I prepare Real Inspector Hound are the pauses and stage business in these early Stoppard plays, how much is going on between lines that this masterful study shows a whole world happening between the monologues and exemplary Shakespeare dialogue. Guil is an inquisitive rhetorician while Ros simply reacts to the logical lapses of his dumbfounded doppelgänger.

Brook’s attempt to make this chapter more personal and immediate still includes theorists such as Brecht, Artaud and Grotowski in a more prudent way: their examples inspire him but do not make Brook. When concluding with the three French concepts, repetition is the work of theatre artists to move the needle into representation but it is the role of the audience is the final pièce of the puzzle for a play.

An essential element of rough theatre is the dirt along the edges, showing that even the holiest concept has not elevated itself too far from the common ground. One playwright that established the right sort of altitude is Brecht but even he escapes into the lofty heights of intellectualism. Turns out that Shakespeare outbrechts Brecht. Only later Brook casts doubt upon these theatrical relics of the Elizabethan age.

What may have been a silly French farce for its time, a handful of Members of Parliament who all have the hots for the same scantily-clad clerk post-swinging sixties, has now become a perennial scandal for elected officials in our nosy era of social media. Strange that this political parody was interrupted by another play rhapsodizing the American landscape, but at least now I know what to look at for seeing Big Ben.

Switching over to the original intention of theatre, a holy ritual of showing the unseen to spectators, gives life to the deadliest forms written about previously. And who better to refer to than our old friend Artaud whose vision of an immersive reality never achieved in his troubled lifetime, still left an impression on theatre artists. Unlike most religions (even Zen) the experience Brook wants is at ground level.

The short, easy-to-follow instructions for readers of drama becomes more obsessed with details one should pick up in the script while glossing over the many more minutiae that a screenplay has in store: Pulp Fiction being the most current it gets. For all the praise Hayman heaps on Stoppard, my rereading of a few plays (plus a recent viewing of his screen adaptation of Tolstoy) reveals how cringe he can get.

For someone whose long career has been devoted to innovating and celebrating theatre, it may come as no surprise that his seminal book on theatre starts out with the deadly corpse of what better theatre has become owing mostly to the demands of a box office. Surprisingly more upbeat things to say about the critics who should be demanding more from the stage yet audiences and actors who cater to them put up with less.

The lecture on Buddhism comes to a close by asserting that each term mentioned by the Blessed One is open to a form-and-formless interpretation yet there seems to be way too many distinctions about these unknowable aspepts such as Paramitss, Samadhis and Nirvana. Each is made into many parts, suggesting that what is known and revealed by the Blessed One remain hidden behind masks of the Buddha from other Buddhalands.

The purpose of this final section aims to inspire confidence that learners will learn and teachers can teach in online spaces as long as they consider the differences from everything learned so far about in-person pedagogy. The best advice running through the book is to take on changes as small steps rather than a complete do over. For a book published in 2019, Darby wisely alerts iffy instructors of online ubiquity.

The first two plays are closely connected as silly inspectors attempt to solve an inconsequential crime, but re-reading them shows a very British contrast. Hound is all about the elegance of a country estate while Margritte is the council housing version that’s crude and xenophobic. So witty suave England as they imagine themselves on stage and the tawdry nation that they are and always have been.

A few more visual examples of stagecraft are pulled from memorable plays and slowly the conversation evolves from what audiences see performed on stage to the active imagination in use by spectators, seeing both the seen and unseen elements. Yet Hayman cautions against a psychoanalytic reading of character’s intentions. Perhaps a subtle jab at Olivier’s film Hamlet that enacts every Freudian slip it can.