• Recommend
  • Download
  • Save to Reading List

Recommendations

Recommendations

  • Alice Josephs:
    12 Jun. 2021
    These intertwined monologues of Charles Dickens and wife Kate are devastating in their simplicity. He wove acclaimed stories for entertainment, but here stories are a vindictive ‘legal’ weapon, forcing us to question what happens when the wronged wife is turned into a ‘character’ for legal purposes. And false storytelling, including unfitness as wife and mother, readily accepted, backed up by Dickens’ status as family patriarch and beloved author. As effective in modern as well as period dress, specifics of the Dickens’s separation take on universal resonance in the #MeToo age of fake news and the court of public opinion.
  • James McLindon:
    17 May. 2021
    A quietly powerful play whose alternating speeches by Charles Dickens and his wife, Kate Dickens, captures structurally his unwillingness to acknowledge his betrayal of her.
  • Christine Foster:
    19 Nov. 2020
    Kate Dickens says the thing she liked least about her husband 's novels were the subservient, dewy-eyed heroines. She's remained subservient, but now, no longer dewy-eyed, has been cast aside for an actress who is. After nine children. Whom he kept. With the house. Kate's loneliness is excruciating and yet she doesn't rail against Charles. It is we the audience, who weep. Simply and perfectly done.
  • Cheryl Bear:
    7 Aug. 2020
    A heartbreaking and beautifully done portrait of the discarded woman in a patriarchal marriage. Great work.
  • Victoria Z. Daly:
    26 Jan. 2020
    So much is conveyed between the lines in this lovely duo of overlapping monologues. Each monologue would be gorgeous by itself; but, woven together, they magnify each other. Laid out through precise, poetic detail, the story leads us to feel for a woman whom the whims and injustices of a patriarchal society have left completely isolated. If only we could say these whims and injustices were a thing of the nineteenth-century past.
  • Doug DeVita:
    21 Dec. 2019
    Heartbreaking and beautifully rendered, this is a perfect ten.
  • Emily Hageman:
    15 Dec. 2019
    Absolutely gorgeous and gutting. This is one incredibly powerful short play, one that I cannot forget, every single word is so perfectly intentioned, so absolutely beautiful and devastating. This is one of the finest short plays I've ever read by one of the finest writers I've had the pleasure of knowing. Just stunning.

Pages