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Doctors of Philosophy: A Play

par Muriel Spark

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1921,136,065 (3.83)6
The only play by famed Scottish author Muriel Spark takes on the dilemmas of two intellectually ambitious women in 1960s England In a home overlooking London's Regent's Canal in the 1960s, two scholars debate the choices they have made with their lives. Catherine Delfont was one of the most promising minds of her generation, but after earning her PhD she gave up her research to marry a well-regarded economist and raise a family. Her cousin Leonora stayed in academia and became a successful classicist, able to observe both the breadth of history and the lives of others with brilliant, cool detachment. Together, they face the sacrifices they have made as women and intellectuals.   First performed in London in 1962 and later in Scandinavia, where it was produced by Ingmar Bergman, Doctors of Philosophy is a fascinating artifact of early second-wave feminism.   This ebook features an illustrated biography of Muriel Spark including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author's archive at the National Library of Scotland.… (plus d'informations)
Récemment ajouté parkitzyl, alo1224, timjdarling2, timjdarling, grandpahobo, thorold, CurrerBell
Bibliothèques historiquesGraham Greene
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When you reflect on how brilliant she was as a writer of dialogue, it's quite a surprise to find that this was Spark's only work written for the stage. Perhaps there were just too many (male) playwrights with big egos around in the London theatrical world of the late fifties and early sixties, and Spark decided that it wasn't worth the effort of trying to get a foot in the door. Or she found that middle-class audiences of the time wanted to see gritty tragedies with plain-spoken working-class heroes, not sophisticated satires about people like themselves...

Anyway, this is one of those Spark pieces that starts out relatively sane and predictable, then veers off into a totally unexpected direction. Leonora and Catherine are cousins who were postgraduate students together a generation ago: one has devoted her life since then to Assyrian palaeography, the other has left academia to become a wife and mother whose daughter is now a PhD student in her turn. And of course each of them wonders whether her life would have been more fulfilling if she had taken a different path. Also in the picture are Catherine's husband Charlie (an economist who knows the price of everything), cousin Annie, who has apparently devoted her life to pleasure, and the cleaning-woman, Mrs S. So far, so normal.

But then it all gets rather strange, in a very Sparkish way. Two further male characters also called Charlie appear, one the daughter's boyfriend, the other a "hulking great lorry driver" who has apparently wandered in by accident; Mrs S gloriously oversteps the role that servants are supposed to play in middle-class drama; the characters start to become concerned about the wobbly set and the feeling they have that they are being watched by an invisible audience; there's a debate about whether the (offstage) broom-cupboard can truly be said to exist; various people fall in the Regents' Canal (which is outside the French windows) and have to be revived, dripping. And the whole "career vs. family" question we thought was going to be at the heart of the play turns out to be a red herring.

Fun, peculiar, and very much of its time. ( )
  thorold | Jun 4, 2018 |
Spark's only play, a very interesting (and little known) play that's going to require rereading. A particularly interesting (and quite current, 10-Feb-2018) review appears in the Scottish Review of Books (and note that this seems to be paywall protected but does allow, I think, three free articles).

Two aspects of this play jumped out at me as I read it. One is Leonora's "definite sense of being watched.... A definite sense of being observed and listened to by an audience.... An invisible audience. Somewhere outside. Looking at all of us and waiting to see what's going to happen." (II, ii). This definitely calls to mind Spark's very first novel, The Comforters.

Another aspect, and somewhat related to the first, is a breaking of the "fourth wall." It's not that the characters address the audience, rather that they themselves interact with the scenery and stage settings as if recognizing that the stage settings are themselves somehow fragile(?), not entirely "real." The author of the Scottish Review of Books article rightly identifies this with "the philosophical world view of Luigi Pirandello, and indeed the convergence with, if not the influence of, a Pirandellian notion of elusive truth, of shifting personality, of the uncertain boundaries between appearance and reality...."

The Scottish Review of Books article is definitely worth checking out after reading this play, and you should be able to access it for free unless you've already used the SRB site enough times to invoke the paywall. ( )
1 voter CurrerBell | May 30, 2018 |
2 sur 2
The question at one level debated is whether the sense of being observed is a neurosis or a symptom of the sense of the numinous. Muriel Spark’s work is imbued with precisely that Catholic consciousness of the transcendent, the belief that external reality is flimsy – another of Leonora’s bon mots – and that there is another dimension to life. The more sensitive, or the more neurotic, of the Delfonts grope towards that sense.... One of the writers who most influenced Spark was Cardinal Newman, who saw the world in those terms.
 
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The only play by famed Scottish author Muriel Spark takes on the dilemmas of two intellectually ambitious women in 1960s England In a home overlooking London's Regent's Canal in the 1960s, two scholars debate the choices they have made with their lives. Catherine Delfont was one of the most promising minds of her generation, but after earning her PhD she gave up her research to marry a well-regarded economist and raise a family. Her cousin Leonora stayed in academia and became a successful classicist, able to observe both the breadth of history and the lives of others with brilliant, cool detachment. Together, they face the sacrifices they have made as women and intellectuals.   First performed in London in 1962 and later in Scandinavia, where it was produced by Ingmar Bergman, Doctors of Philosophy is a fascinating artifact of early second-wave feminism.   This ebook features an illustrated biography of Muriel Spark including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author's archive at the National Library of Scotland.

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