Simulated and tense

Another simulated teaching session that will be carried out before our semester ends really makes most of us feel tensed and pressurised. In my opinion, King Lear is a very complicated and difficult text. Even when we study the text, we have difficulties in understanding the text explicitly and implicitly. However, we have have to teach the text at this moment to students, which is certainly a very challenging task. I had spent a lot of time trying to find an appropriate extract to portray the characteristics of Lear's daughters. This is because one will not find a single extract that will contain all the criteria that one wishes to work on. After cracking my head, I managed to find an extract that portrays Cordelia's traits. One will find that Lear has all the negative connotations for his daughter. In the contrary, France values Cordelia as an unprized precious maid. I will try my best to carry out this teaching.

Pinter's The Homecoming

Wow! Interesting! I just came back from a stage play that ended two hours ago. I would say that it was an amazing experience for me to watch a live play for the first time. Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, that was the show I watched tonight, left me to think a lot about the human or family relationship. The play was about Terry’s homecoming with his wife, Ruth, after six years of living in America. One would find that all the members in the family were so much in unstable emotions and anguish. They were all different, even Ruth was different. She flirted with all the other brothers in the family in front of her husband’s eyes. How weird it is! Another thing that I would like to mention is that I could not stand the smoke of both cigarettes and cigars caused by the father. I was close to the actors as I took the seat at the second row. However, I enjoyed the play very much and I especially liked the lighting of the play. I was captured by every move of the actors. I enjoyed scrutinising other characters’ facial expressions while one talks in the play. The ending of the play was shocking because the family would ignore a dying person who fainted on the floor while they were busy buzzing around the flirtatious Ruth. Lastly, I would say that KLPAC is placed in a beautiful park which is in tranquillity and serenity.

Desires......................................

A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennesse Williams is a play deals very much with the theme of illusion and fantasy. The protagonist in the play, Blanche, is a thirty-year-old lady who dwells in her own illusions. This is why she keeps telling lies to people around her because she could not confront the truth and also her own weaknesses. She is a very inconfident person who loses her faith in herself day by day as she grows older. How sad if one has to put herself in her own fantasy world just because she could not face her real true self and reality of life. On the other hand, Stella also is a victim of her own illusion. She has married an abusive and brutal man but she does not intend to make a change. In the end, she chooses to let go of her own sister but stay with her wild husband. I think this thene is even relevant to our life because we do find someone that they do not believe the truth because that will lead to the tragedies and problems which they do not wish to confront with. However, avoiding a problem does not promise the resolution of the obstacles.

Educating Rita? My Fair Lady? Pygmalion!!!

Pygmalion
The legendary sculptor.

Image by permission of the online edition of © Bulfinch's Mythology.Permission is limited exclusively to the Encyclopedia Mythica.



Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, interesting! When i read the play, the feeling is just like reading Educating Rita, a play by Willy Russell. When I was young, i did not quite enjoy the movie My Fair Lady, most probably because I did not understand the language issue that is discussed in it.
Pygnalion discusses about education, which I think it influences an individual's personal growth a lot. Education will train a person how to behave and know which is right or wrong. For the cas of Eliza, she makes up her mind to be more educated than she was, so that she could work in a flower shop or even be a duchess! However, the product of education does not succeed in its best way in a short time of period. Look at just how we educate a child, we take at least eleven years to nurture him and prepare him to face the world with his learned things. It takes time to learn. Therefore, Eliza can act as a duchess, but that is not her, that is just her acting.