The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

 

Title:  The Importance of Being Earnest

Author:  Oscar Wilde

Narrated by:  Full Cast Audio Adaptation featuring Tim Brooke-Taylor

Publisher: Spiteful Puppet

Length: Approximately 1 hours and 56 minutes

Source: Checked out with Hoopla through the Kewaunee Public Library.  Thank-you!

Do you like to read plays?  If so, what are some of your favorite plays to read?

I had watched The Importance of Being Earnest movie back when it came out in 2002, but I had never read the actual play.  @Deesreads put together a read along for The Importance of Being Earnest in June.  I listened to this full cast production, and it was delightful and a fun audiobook.

The Importance of Being Earnest is a madcap comedy of mistaken identities.  Jack Worthing is a wealthy man.  He was adopted by his uncle Thomas Worthing after being found at a train station.  He goes by the name Ernest while in London.  He falls in love with a young woman named Gwendolen who only agrees to marry him as she wants to marry a man named Ernest. 

The play moves on to Jack’s country estate.  He has a young ward named Cecily.  His friend Algernon arrives and calls himself Jack’s long-lost brother, Ernest.  Cecily and Algernon fall in love. The story all comes to a head when Gwendolen and Cecily meet and realize they are both engaged to Ernest.  The play solves this problem neatly in the third act.

This was a clever comedy and it reminded me of a Shakespeare comedy updated to Victorian times.  I really liked that the audiobook was a full cast production.  The voice actors were entertaining, and it helped me to realize who was speaking since I couldn’t see the actors.  There were many great one-liners that were witty and made me laugh.  I also liked the look into Victorian Society and the foibles of the upper class.  I thought the theme of double identity was very interesting particularly with Oscar Wilde’s sad life story.

I hope to someday see this play performed live!

Favorite Quote:  “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

Title: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Author: William Shakespeare

Read by: Full Cast Recording

Publisher: Naxos Audio

Length: Approximately 2 hours and 18 minutes

Source: From the Kewaunee Public Library through the Overdrive System

Shakespeare was meant to be read aloud.  Even when I took Shakespeare classes in high school and college, I would read the plays out loud to myself.  As plays, they are meant to be spoken word.  That is why I always enjoy audiobook productions of Shakespeare’s plays.

This production was wonderful.  They had a full cast play all the parts and they acted them with their all.  I especially love hearing this play spoken with British accents.  I also loved the classical music that was played between scenes of the play in this audiobook.  It was very fitting with the play and enjoyable.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s comedies.  Theseus, Duke of Athens is marrying Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons in a wooded area that is also inhabited by Fairy folk.  As events unfold, various couples are caught up in various misunderstandings and hilarity ensues.

I love that this play focuses on both love and on comedy.  Nick Bottom and Puck are two of my favorite comedy characters in any of Shakespeare’s plays and they both appear in this play.  I also love how misunderstandings form a lot of the comedy in a Shakespeare play.  In this play there is a love potion that causes a lot of misunderstandings.  I also love plays within a play.  This one has a play that is so terribly performed that everyone thinks it is a comedy which is quite hilarious.  The bad acting comes through in the audiobook version of this play within a play.

I saw a wonderful outdoor production way back in 2000 put on by the American Player’s Theatre in Spring Green, Wisconsin.  It was an outdoor theatre and the play was magical.  I was in Wisconsin with my best friend Jenn visiting her Aunt and Uncle in Madison, a couple of years before I moved to Wisconsin.  It was so nice of her Aunt and Uncle to take us to this production – and it is something that I will never forget.  Seeing Shakespeare on stage is always wonderful, but this production was especially wonderful as the setting was the woods and having the actual play outdoors fit so well.  The audiobook version of this play is fantastic – but seeing the actual production, even better.

I revisited A Midsummer Night’s as part of the Facebook Literary Classics group for May readings.

Favorite Quotes

“The course of true love never did run smooth.”

“And yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays.”

“Though she be but little, she is fierce!”

Overall, A Midsummer’s Night Dream is a wonderful class comic play and audiobook.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J.K. Rowling, John Tiffany, & Jack Throne

“Do you know there is a new Harry Potter book out?”  I have been asked this countless times over the past couple of months.  I did know there was a new Harry Potter tale out, but I knew it was a play that was opening in London and the script was being published as a hardcover – not as a narrative book.  I also know that J.K. Rowling said that the Harry Potter series stopped by book seven and I felt unwilling to move on from what had been promised.  Then I kept hearing snippets of all sorts of intriguing things happening in the Harry Potter world and I could not resist anymore and ordered the book.

I first fell in love with Harry Potter in my undergraduate years at Michigan Tech in the late 1990’s.  The first two books had been published and I heard great things about them.  I received them for a Christmas present and soon found myself engrossed in the tale.  Friends would laugh to find me in cubbyholes between engineering classes reading furiously.  I preordered each of the following novels and loved the entire series.  Was I ready to see what happened to Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger 19 years later?  Yes.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child starts off right where book seven ended – with Harry, Ginny, Ron, and Hermione dropping their kids off to take the Hogwarts Express to school.  Harry’s middle son, Albus, worries that he will be sorted into Syltherin and his worst fear is realized.  He also befriends Draco Malfoy’s young son, Scorpius.  Harry and Albus struggle with their father and son relationship, especially when Harry tries to ban the friendship between Albus and Scorpius.  Albus feels adrift and decides to correct what he feels was his father’s greatest error by stealing a Time-Tuner with Scorpius and a new friend, Delphi.  They travel back to the Triwizard Tournament that was held in Book 4:  The Goblet of Fire.  Things don’t go exactly as planned and time goes amuck.  I thought of this as Back to the Future 2 after Biff goes back in time and screws up the future.  Will Albus and Scorpius be able to remain friends?  Will time go back to what it was or will dark forces be unleased?

I really enjoyed this play, and it really made me want to see it on the stage.  I hope it comes to the United States one day and/or gets turned into a fantastic movie.  It was a very engaging story.  I missed the great detail that is found in a Rowling novel and wished that she could turn this story into a full-fledged novel.  As it was a play, it was a very quick read.  This was welcome as my oldest son (10-year old Kile) started the Harry Potter series at the end of July and just finished book six today.  I realized I better get this review up as he will be reading this play before I know it!

My favorite quotes:

“Meet the once-great Harry Potter, now a stone-cold Ministry man.  I will leave you in peace, sir.  If peace is the right word for it.” – Mr. Diggory

“The truth is a beautiful and terrible thing and should therefore be treated with great caution.  Dumbledore.” – Harry Potter

“I don’t care what you did or who you saved, but you are a constant curse on my family, Harry Potter.” – Draco Malfoy

Do you enjoy reading plays?  What is the play you’ve enjoyed the most?

Are you a fan of Harry Potter?  Have you read The Cursed Child?  If so, what did you think?

Overall, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was a great story.  I would have loved the detail that a novel would have contained, but the storyline was intriguing. I also loved the growth and different three dimensional view the storyline gave many of the characters, in particular, Draco Malfoy.

Book Source:  Amazon.com

Richard III by William Shakespeare

Title: Richard III
Author: William Shakespeare
Read by:  The Folger Theatre – The Folger Shakespeare Library Full Cast Recording
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio

Length: Approximately 3 hours (3 CDs)
Source:  Review Copy from Simon & Schuster – Thanks!

I have never read or watched Richard III by William Shakespeare, but I love to read historical fiction set in this time period.  I was very happy to have the opportunity to review this audiobook.

Richard III is the full cast full length dramatic reading of the Shakespeare play.  This makes it very entertaining with each part read by a different actor complete with sound effects and music between each scene. What I discovered while listening to this audiobook is that Shakespeare painted a very dark picture of Richard III.  He is a Machiavellian character that works his way through the play to complete evil.  Shakespeare also condenses the timeline greatly.  Years pass by very quickly from Edward IV’s reign, death, Richard’s marriage, rise, and end all in a three hour play.

I read about this time period frequently so I understood most of the action although this was my first experience with the play.  I think the perfect experience with this audiobook would be to listen to it while actually reading through a Shakespeare play.  This type of audiobook would have been so helpful while in high school or college Shakespeare classes.

Overall, I enjoyed listening to Richard III.  It was a great audiobook production.  I found myself interested by the play, but it was not one of my favorite Shakespeare plays.  I think the problem for me is that I am such a great fan of the time period.  I think that Shakespeare painted Richard III was a one dimensional character that was only evil, and failed to capture the true nuances of whether Richard III was good or evil.  It was more an exaggeration of the real historical figure.

I loved hearing my two favorite quotes in this play:

“Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.”

A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!