#FOOTLIGHT CLUB 2016 HOW TO#
#FOOTLIGHT CLUB 2016 FULL#
#FOOTLIGHT CLUB 2016 PRO#

Mabel Derwent goes over to the Hindoo tray and picks up a big cream-candy out of a box and eats it, and says, “Yum! Yum!” with animal relish.

#FOOTLIGHT CLUB 2016 PRO#

After the first act, they are generally pro the poisoning plan, but have yet to see Mabel on stage. In between giving us their dialogue, and some amusing stage directions, Leacock also gives us the views of the sympathetic (albeit small) audience. I hope my pronouns in that sentence were disentangleable. This particular play is about Lionel and Helga, married (respectively) to Mabel and Charles, who have decided to poison their partners because they are holding them back from ‘following the higher call of their natures’. And if you’re reading my blog, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that you probably do. We all recognise this sort of play, I suspect, if we have any fondness for the 1920s. In art and literature it used to constitute the happy ending. Let it be noted that marriage, which used to be a sacrament, became presently a contract and now a problem. It always deals in one way or another with the “problem of marriage”. It is named by such a name as The Soul Call, or The Heart Yearn, or The Stomach Trouble – always something terribly perplexed and with 60 per cent of sex in it.

#FOOTLIGHT CLUB 2016 FULL#

It’s Leacock’s version of the 1920s problem play – about knowing oneself and – well, I’ll let Leacock explain:Īt the opposite pole of thought from the good old melodrama, full of wind and seaweed and danger, is the ultra-modern, up-to-date Piffle-Play. My favourite – though perhaps it is because I know this genre best – is ‘The Soul Call’. It’s all wonderful stuff, requiring only the smallest of acquaintances with the genre in question to amuse.

Even the cinema gets a look-in, with a desert bounty picture (‘Dear Man’s Gold’), as does Greek tragedy as performed by a university drama club. There’s a parodic Ibsen, and exemplars (of a fashion) of Russian plays new and old. Things kick off with a wonderful melodrama, ‘Cast up by the Sea’ (‘Why didn’t he explain? Why didn’t he shout out, “Hiram, I’m not a villain at all I’m your old friend!” Oh, pshaw! who ever did explain things in the second act of a melodrama? And where would the drama be if they did?’). It is somewhat surprising that his theatrical topics remain recognisable to the 21 st-century reader (or at least this one and any with a working knowledge of turn of the century theatre). Imagine, if you will, a genre being ever so slightly heightened, and presented while at the same time being affectionately observed – dialogue interspersed with the reason for it being thus phrased – and you’ll begin to grasp what Leacock is doing.

#FOOTLIGHT CLUB 2016 HOW TO#

How to describe these pieces? They are not spoofs, because they are too kind and too subtle for that. The ‘other fancies’, at the end, are not we will come onto those. Like other Leacock books, it is a collection of short pieces – in this case, they are mostly – as the title suggests – theatrically themed. What’s the opposite of burying the lede? Obviously you’ll have gathered by now that I did, very much, enjoy Over The Footlights and Other Fancies (1923). Would I still like him after all this time, with at least a thousand more books read since I last read one of his? Delafield, and Richmal Crompton, he was in the first tranche of authors I collected – and those who helped form my taste. Which is fairly absurd, given how many I have unread, and how much I enjoy him. I would probably cite Leacock as among my favourite writers, and have read a fair few of his books (and amassed more), but I haven’t actually read one of his since I was 18, around 13 years ago. I wanted to read something reliably enjoyable on Christmas Day (and, as it turned out, Boxing Day) and was mulling over what it would be – when Stephen Leacock leapt to mind. It is for books such as this that I put off creating my Top Ten Books of the year until the last possible movement.

Footlight club 2016