Theatre Book Reviews

Portraits is quite an achievement, as dauntingly detailed in its character descriptions as Shaw (who also wanted his actors to have particular heights, clothes, and eye colors, and his sets to have specific furniture), and as discursive in its stage directions as O’Neill.

This not to say Portraits is Shavian, or as steeped in naturalistic turmoil as O’Neill. Rather, as Higgs Boson (an amusing pseudonym) states in his author note, it’s an attempt, on the whole successful, to revive the Theatre of the Absurd, with its echoes of Ionesco, Sartre, and Durenmatt, and, farther afield, A Frolic of His Own[…]

I approached this book warily. After all, fiction and playwriting are such different forms, why put the two together? Fiction is designed to pull you into a world, and a published play requires you to imagine seeing a stage and, despite the stage directions, you forget that a stage is there or that the script is really meant for actors. Ideally, the characters and actions are so intriguing, you forget all the artifice. It’s a difficult form to get right for readers.

Still, as a published novelist and produced playwright, I adore both forms, so I plunged in, starting with […]