Stefan zweig

Visit From An Unknown Woman, adapted by Christopher Hampton from a short story by Stefan Zweig, opens like an episode of Seinfeld. A playboy writer enjoys a fling with a black-clad beauty – but when he kisses her goodbye, he can’t remember her name. It feels like a set-up for a gag, but the script is very short of jokes. A year passes and the mysterious beauty, named Marianne, returns to the playboy’s pad and delivers a series of astonishing revelations. At this point, the show turns into a memory play as Marianne starts to yammer about her childhood, her family struggles and a mass of other details which sound

Dublin. 16 June 1904. A little after 8 a.m. Two men – both annoying, one stung with grief and ambition – are having an argument. One is pierced by thoughts of his late mother. ‘Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart.’ She has come to him in a dream smelling of wax and rosewood. ‘Dedalus,’ the other calls up to him. ‘Come down, like a good mosey. Breakfast is ready.’ Ireland. 16 June 1982. 6:30 a.m. Radios all over the country emit the words ‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan’, and don’t stop broadcasting until they have read out every word of Ulysses, down to its last,

One of the stranger things that happened in the period just before lockdown was the sudden disappearance of audiences from TV and radio shows. Late-night hosts told jokes to silent rooms in front of a white background, dutifully pausing for a laugh that never came; panel shows were broadcast without so much as the sound of tumbleweed. Punchlines flopped, charisma evaporated. It was as if Earth’s comedians had been banished to some purgatorial realm, where they would be forced to tell jokes to no one as a form of penance. Comedy needs an audience. It’s not clear that the same is true of short stories. In Selected Shorts, well-known actors