In Competition No. 2761 you were invited to provide an example of critics debating a trivial point in an absurd way.
This challenge was inspired by the parody, at the end of N.F. Simpson’s A Resounding Tinkle, of critics solemnly discussing whether the play they have just seen is a ‘hotchpotch’ or a ‘gallimaufry’.
I liked Chris O’Carroll’s dissection of the nuances of ‘myriad’ and ‘plethora’, and both Basil Ransome-Davies and G.M. Davis neatly captured the childish, foot-stomping undercurrent that sometimes characterises the exchanges between squabbling critics. The entries that most impressed though, in a smallish postbag, are printed below and earn their authors £30 apiece. Adrian Fry wins the bonus fiver.
Did the doors in this production work for you?
To the extent that they allowed the characters ingress and egress, incontestably so. One sees roles played every night, but it’s invigorating to witness such ludic trickery supplanted by honest being.
Not that performance skills were absent. The squeaky hinged door upstage left seemed excessively expressive, a rare example of the scenery chewing itself.
Deliberately counterpointed, I’m sure you noticed, by the almost subtextually subtle jamb on the door downstage right; symbolic, doubtless, of the jam humanity seems habitually to be in.
For me, a subtext has failed if one becomes aware of it.
Undoubtedly the subtext — that inanimate objects suffer too — gained considerable emotional heft from being completely indiscernible.
If I had one criticism — and I don’t — it would be that, two hours of drama notwithstanding, neither door went on a journey.
They opened, they closed: existence encapsulated, I’d say. Adrian Fry
Speaker A: Yes, nomenclature is clearly functionally determinative, but in this context surely the word ‘play’ is a critical evasion for what is properly a quasi-mimetic receptive experience, which in any case has historically been stripped by anti-feminist critics (including the author himself) of the gender and transgendering implications made patent by the unsexing of the actual, rather than the so-called eponymous principal protagonist?
Speaker B: I am fully convinced of the polyfunctional semiotics here.
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