Octagon, Bolton
There's a joke that goes like this: two behavioural psychologists are in bed together and one says to the other: "That was good for you, how was it for me?"
David Lodge's play is adapted from his 2001 novel Thinks ... and gives the joke dramatic form. Helen Reed, a recently widowed novelist, seeks solace through a placement on a windswept provincial campus. Ralph Messenger, an expert in artificial intelligence, is the university's resident media star, forever chasing headlines and women.
Lodge's novel boils down neatly into an intellectually and erotically charged dialogue on the nature of the mind. For Messenger, a scientist, consciousness is an unquantifiable problem; for Reed, a novelist, it is her stock-in-trade. Lodge has great fun with their disparities of discourse: Messenger reads one of Reed's books and dismisses it as "women's writing"; she in turn reads a paper on grief and discovers she is suffering from "a cognitive adjustment to an attachment structure in response to a death event".
Lodge cannot quite eradicate the sense that some of the cerebral jousting has a more natural home in a novel than on stage. Yet after a laboured start, the characters gradually begin to seem more like people than conduits for ideas. Kate Coogan impressively mines the core of Reed's repressed Catholicism; Rob Edwards conveys Messenger's arrogance without making him repellent. David Thacker's cool, considered production gives the impression of a show that may be easier to admire than adore, yet by the end quite satisfactorily readjusts one's attachment structure.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/may/18/secret-thoughts-review
Sir Alex Ferguson Scotland Financial crisis Winter sports Norway Florida
No comments:
Post a Comment