TJ Burns
6 books read for LibriVox
- A Hamilton play a century before the musical: George Arliss's stage vehicle about the funding fight and the Reynolds blackmail, built for strong curtain lines. Creaky in places, brisk in most, and fascinating as what 1917 wanted its founders to be.
- You get an unusually tender eighteenth-century comedy, where Bevil’s decency matters more than clever plotting and Tom and Phillis keep the earnestness from becoming airless. It’s slow and openly sentimental, but its concern with kindness, duty, and emotional restraint still feels surprisingly intimate.
- You get a filthy, sharply engineered Restoration comedy, with Horner’s fake impotence setting off Pinchwife’s paranoid jealousy and Margery’s blunt country innocence. The sexual politics are ugly in places, but the wordplay and social hypocrisy stay wonderfully alive if you enjoy comedy with teeth.
- You'll spend the whole play watching Paula fight for a fresh start she half-knows society won't allow her, and it stings because Pinero refuses to make her a villain or a saint. A short read, quietly brutal, better if you like drawing-room drama with teeth.
- You get sharp, brittle dialogue and a surprisingly bruised family drama, with Nicky’s drug use exposing the rot beneath his mother Florence’s glamorous social life. It’s melodramatic and a little dated, but Coward’s cruelty and comic timing make the emotional collisions land.