I may have mentioned before that I've historically tended to use my summer trip out west as a time to assess my life, look at where I'm going, where I want to go, etc.
It's only just started, so I've come to no conclusions yet, I can only look at the couple things that have struck me...
Oscar Wilde's style of writing in epigrams is easy to make fun of like in this Monty Python skit. "There is only one thing worse than doing X, and that is not doing X."
I can resist everything except temptation.
I love talking about nothing, father. It is the only thing I know anything about.
Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious.
And so on. But there's a lot of truth in many of his lines. Like the famous one about "not being talked about." And I liked this one in the play last night: "in England a man who can’t talk morality twice a week to a large, popular, immoral audience is quite over as a serious politician." The context in the play is that the protagonist can't come out and admit to something dishonest he did in his youth, because it would end his political career. And politicians have to act like their perfectly moral, for an audience full of immoral people. It's crazy.
And this line by Lord Goring struck me for the first time:
"Never mind what I say, Robert! I am always saying what I shouldn’t say. In fact, I usually say what I really think. A great mistake nowadays. It makes one so liable to be misunderstood."
No wonder Goring is my favourite character--that's the story of my life. Not that I believe in just spouting out everything that comes into my mind, and I don't. But there's something true in there, that the more real you are, the more likely you are to be misunderstood. I guess because you're not cleaning up and organizing the phrase for mass consumption first.
And I've always loved "Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it." I take life very seriously, but that's not how I deal or interact with it. And the more serious I'm expected to be, the less I feel like myself.
Anyway, I'm just blathering. I'm not sure what I took away from An Ideal Husband, except that I know I took away something. At the very least it reinforced my love of all things Oscar.
What I got from [title of show] was a little simpler. It touches on all the usual themes in art, about being yourself, creating what you love, having confidence in your own vision, not editing yourself for mass consumption. One of the songs on that theme is Die, Vampire Die! And the other is Nine People's Favourite Thing: "I'd rather be nine people's favourite thing than a hundred peoples' ninth favourite thing." Nothing new or heavy deep, but I'm glad they included it in the show, because these things are definitely part of the creative process.
Anyway, that's it.
No comments:
Post a Comment