How you make me feel; projection and its identification.

Why do we trust some people and not others?  Why do we admire some people?   Why do some people make us uncomfortable?  Is it because they remind us of significant figures in our lives; our mother, our father, a brother or sister, a lover, a husband, wife, a teacher?   Are... Read more »

An Ideal Husband

So how should we regard the delectable Mrs Chevely, with her arch looks and glittering Lamia gown  so wonderfully nuanced by Ms Bond?  Lord Goring has no doubt.   ‘She looks like a woman with a past, doesn’t she?   Most pretty women do.  But there is a fashion in pasts just as... Read more »

Design for Living? I don’t think it will work.

It should be easy, you know.  The actual facts are so simple.  I love you.  You love me. You love Otto. I love Otto.  Otto loves you.  Otto loves me.’ Oh My God!   Or as Mrs ‘Odge might say,  ‘Well, ‘eres a pretty pickle.’      So why isn’t it easy?    Why shouldn’t... Read more »

You shouldn’t ever go back

I rarely watch television.  Most of it is rubbish; idiotic game shows, predictable soaps, tedious news commentary and mind numbing adverts.  But ‘The Song of Lunch’,  the dramatisation of Christopher Reid’s narrative, superbly performed by Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson,  was something different.    Shocking, intense and bleak, the poem is... Read more »

Winter’s coming. To the barricades!

It was 1789. France was still a feudal monarchy.  All the power and the wealth was in the hands of the aristocracy,  the King was like a God.  His ancestor, Louis XIV, the Sun King, had built himself a wonderful palace in Versailles.  The people had no voice. All the... Read more »

The dangerous politics of love.

The seventeenth century was a bad time for women.  They had no autonomy, no rights.  They were treated as the property of men; they had to obey their husbands and fathers.  Fathers would promise their daughters to men they didn’t love for political advantage. Husbands would keep their wives locked... Read more »

A Habit of Art

Do writers tend to write more about themselves as they get older?  I guess they do.  Art, literature, musical composition is projection; an expression of aspects of the self.  This applies to all creative activity; the world seen through the filter of personal experience.   It tells us more about the... Read more »

Possession; on stage and off it.

Good actors, declared Sir Richard Eyre, speaking last week at The Guild of Psychotherapists annual lecture, have to be possessed by the characters they are playing.  They have to immerse themselves in their character’s world, feel what it is like to be them, experience the passion and then act it... Read more »

War without end; Amen.

Armies pursued each other around Europe; soldiers, little better than animals laid waste the countryside, taking what they wanted, burning, raping, killing, no longer knowing, if they ever did, the reason why.  It had been a good war for Mother Courage, for a time. She became a camp follower, trailing... Read more »

Death, desire and despair at the Odioun; the pholly of Phedre

She has desired Hippolytus since the day she married his father.  Proud,  aloof, disdainful of women; he has all the strength of the father but none of his sire's weakness for sexual temptation, or so it seems.  He is a real challenge.  She has to possess him, but Hippolytus is... Read more »

Duet for one; the destructive narcissism of the performer

Stephanie was a virtuoso violinist until she was struck down with multiple sclerosis. Now her fingering is clumsy, her bowing uneven, her music sounds scratchy and discordant. She can’t do it anymore. She is destroyed. Music was her whole life. It was her joy... Read more »