Review

Oh no, the thees and thous are here...I can't say I've ever much enjoyed plays. Which is sort of interesting if you ever read my reviews on certain films that are very stageplay-esque. I tend to love them. But just reading through a play without seeing anything feels like it's really lacking the critical thing. The magic. The reason that we're here. Which is the actors emoting. Always hated whenever we did Shakespeare in school. It just felt like a rather dry set of words that were on that page that we read and then moved on with our lives from.

So I can't say I particularly enjoyed Ajax. It has the problem of being a play that I am reading and not seeing. It's also incredibly short. I can imagine a world where plays are a far more regular occurrence. You go and see some people act out a thing for an hour and you go home happy. So I understand the place that this originally filled. I would say Ajax (and I fear further plays from the time that I read) suffers primarily from being the wrong medium, but also having to stand up to the titan that is Homer. The Iliad and The Odyssey did work as textual stories. They had their problems, but I could follow them in a text form. Ajax I super started skimming. Which is funny given how short it is (again, took less than an hour to get through). But when a character goes "Alas! I suffer!" And then another character goes "Alas! I suffer!" and you see there's a third person in line, the skimming's just gotta happen.

I appreciated Ajax's incredible melodrama of falling right on his sword. We may have a new top contender for Achilles' throne.

(Exit Ajax)