Brendan Moir's Playwright Corner
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Brendan Moir's Playwright Corner episodes

  • Karel Čapek: RUR, Act IV

    One of the cornerstones of early science fiction writing, and the work that introduced the concept of "robot" to the western world, Rossum's Universal Robots (or RUR) is Karel Čapek's finest work, and is the inspiration for multiple pop culture references from the 1940's through the 80's, ranging from works such as The Night of the Living Dead, Do Robots Dream of Electric Sheep, and multiple other pieces of art for the screen, stage, and page.

    Come with me and witness how humanity's hubris creates the very instructions for its own demise, step by step and logic by logic. See how robots were made to take over humanity's drudgery, how an AI learns to overwrite it's programming, and how any and all institutions become meaningless if a entire race of beings are not beholden to it.

    It's the source of every trope and fear that was instilled into the genre back in the 1920's, and the ideas and philosophies put forward are still relevant to today's society. Let's just hope that none of what's put down here on paper ever comes to fruition....


    Follow me on other platforms:

    https://bemuse.bandcamp.com

    https://www.instagram.com/talentunlimited1/?hl=en

    https://open.spotify.com/artist/0wiNjFbd6rluEHZF4Qffcv

    https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100070481824821&locale=hi_IN

    https://www.patreon.com/bemuse

    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLZ_sUa8kfdu3qa6GSzbDiw


    Website: https://bemusearts.com


    *This Season's Album Art by Brian Fisher*


    Karrel Čapek (1890-1938) was a Czech writer, playwright, critic and journalist. He has become best known for his science fiction, including his novel War with the Newts (1936) and play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots, 1920), which introduced the word robot. He also wrote many politically charged works dealing with the social turmoil of his time.


    *Any views/ideas expressed in these plays are not my own, and I do not believe in the censoring of anything controversial or problematic that the playwright/poet/author has written which will impact the way in which the story is told. The integrity of these works is much more important to me than any triggering content, and therefore I would ask that you have the same maturity and mental framework to listen to these pieces of art and appreciate them in their proper historical context.*

    24 min
  • Karel Čapek: RUR, Act III

    One of the cornerstones of early science fiction writing, and the work that introduced the concept of "robot" to the western world, Rossum's Universal Robots (or RUR) is Karel Čapek's finest work, and is the inspiration for multiple pop culture references from the 1940's through the 80's, ranging from works such as The Night of the Living Dead, Do Robots Dream of Electric Sheep, and multiple other pieces of art for the screen, stage, and page.

    Come with me and witness how humanity's hubris creates the very instructions for its own demise, step by step and logic by logic. See how robots were made to take over humanity's drudgery, how an AI learns to overwrite it's programming, and how any and all institutions become meaningless if a entire race of beings are not beholden to it.

    It's the source of every trope and fear that was instilled into the genre back in the 1920's, and the ideas and philosophies put forward are still relevant to today's society. Let's just hope that none of what's put down here on paper ever comes to fruition....


    Follow me on other platforms:

    https://bemuse.bandcamp.com

    https://www.instagram.com/talentunlimited1/?hl=en

    https://open.spotify.com/artist/0wiNjFbd6rluEHZF4Qffcv

    https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100070481824821&locale=hi_IN

    https://www.patreon.com/bemuse

    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLZ_sUa8kfdu3qa6GSzbDiw


    Website: https://bemusearts.com


    *This Season's Album Art by Brian Fisher*


    Karrel Čapek (1890-1938) was a Czech writer, playwright, critic and journalist. He has become best known for his science fiction, including his novel War with the Newts (1936) and play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots, 1920), which introduced the word robot. He also wrote many politically charged works dealing with the social turmoil of his time.


    *Any views/ideas expressed in these plays are not my own, and I do not believe in the censoring of anything controversial or problematic that the playwright/poet/author has written which will impact the way in which the story is told. The integrity of these works is much more important to me than any triggering content, and therefore I would ask that you have the same maturity and mental framework to listen to these pieces of art and appreciate them in their proper historical context.*

    39 min
  • Karel Čapek: RUR, Act II

    One of the cornerstones of early science fiction writing, and the work that introduced the concept of "robot" to the western world, Rossum's Universal Robots (or RUR) is Karel Čapek's finest work, and is the inspiration for multiple pop culture references from the 1940's through the 80's, ranging from works such as The Night of the Living Dead, Do Robots Dream of Electric Sheep, and multiple other pieces of art for the screen, stage, and page.

    Come with me and witness how humanity's hubris creates the very instructions for its own demise, step by step and logic by logic. See how robots were made to take over humanity's drudgery, how an AI learns to overwrite it's programming, and how any and all institutions become meaningless if a entire race of beings are not beholden to it.

    It's the source of every trope and fear that was instilled into the genre back in the 1920's, and the ideas and philosophies put forward are still relevant to today's society. Let's just hope that none of what's put down here on paper ever comes to fruition....


    Follow me on other platforms:

    https://bemuse.bandcamp.com

    https://www.instagram.com/talentunlimited1/?hl=en

    https://open.spotify.com/artist/0wiNjFbd6rluEHZF4Qffcv

    https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100070481824821&locale=hi_IN

    https://www.patreon.com/bemuse

    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLZ_sUa8kfdu3qa6GSzbDiw


    Website: https://bemusearts.com


    *This Season's Album Art by Brian Fisher*


    Karrel Čapek (1890-1938) was a Czech writer, playwright, critic and journalist. He has become best known for his science fiction, including his novel War with the Newts (1936) and play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots, 1920), which introduced the word robot. He also wrote many politically charged works dealing with the social turmoil of his time.


    *Any views/ideas expressed in these plays are not my own, and I do not believe in the censoring of anything controversial or problematic that the playwright/poet/author has written which will impact the way in which the story is told. The integrity of these works is much more important to me than any triggering content, and therefore I would ask that you have the same maturity and mental framework to listen to these pieces of art and appreciate them in their proper historical context.*

    38 min
  • Karel Čapek: RUR, Act I

    One of the cornerstones of early science fiction writing, and the work that introduced the concept of "robot" to the western world, Rossum's Universal Robots (or RUR) is Karel Čapek's finest work, and is the inspiration for multiple pop culture references from the 1940's through the 80's, ranging from works such as The Night of the Living Dead, Do Robots Dream of Electric Sheep, and multiple other pieces of art for the screen, stage, and page.

    Come with me and witness how humanity's hubris creates the very instructions for its own demise, step by step and logic by logic. See how robots were made to take over humanity's drudgery, how an AI learns to overwrite it's programming, and how any and all institutions become meaningless if a entire race of beings are not beholden to it.

    It's the source of every trope and fear that was instilled into the genre back in the 1920's, and the ideas and philosophies put forward are still relevant to today's society. Let's just hope that none of what's put down here on paper ever comes to fruition....


    Follow me on other platforms:

    https://bemuse.bandcamp.com

    https://www.instagram.com/talentunlimited1/?hl=en

    https://open.spotify.com/artist/0wiNjFbd6rluEHZF4Qffcv

    https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100070481824821&locale=hi_IN

    https://www.patreon.com/bemuse

    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLZ_sUa8kfdu3qa6GSzbDiw


    Website: https://bemusearts.com


    *This Season's Album Art by Brian Fisher*


    Karrel Čapek (1890-1938) was a Czech writer, playwright, critic and journalist. He has become best known for his science fiction, including his novel War with the Newts (1936) and play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots, 1920), which introduced the word robot. He also wrote many politically charged works dealing with the social turmoil of his time.


    *Any views/ideas expressed in these plays are not my own, and I do not believe in the censoring of anything controversial or problematic that the playwright/poet/author has written which will impact the way in which the story is told. The integrity of these works is much more important to me than any triggering content, and therefore I would ask that you have the same maturity and mental framework to listen to these pieces of art and appreciate them in their proper historical context.*

    37 min
  • J.M. Synge: Shadow of the Glen

    Riders to the Sea & Shadow of the Glen are both one act plays by J.M. Synge, an Irish playwright in the early 20th Century who made it his life's mission to accurately depict the people of the Irish Countryside.

    Riders to the Sea is a Tragedy in One Act about a mother and her daughters dealing with a familial curse that seems to cause all of the men in the family to die. Anxieties come to a peak when the last, remaining son is getting ready to ride out to sea in order to try and provide for his family.

    Shadow of the Glen is a contemplative Drama in One Act about how a women's integrity can be unjustly scrutinized through hearsay and speculation, and how forcing those opinions out into the open can have disastrous consequences for everyone involved.


    Follow me on other platforms:

    https://bemuse.bandcamp.com

    https://www.instagram.com/talentunlimited1/?hl=en

    https://open.spotify.com/artist/0wiNjFbd6rluEHZF4Qffcv

    https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100070481824821&locale=hi_IN

    https://www.patreon.com/bemuse

    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLZ_sUa8kfdu3qa6GSzbDiw


    Website: https://bemusearts.com


    *This Season's Album Art by Brian Fisher*


    Edmund John Millington Synge (1871–1909) was an Irish playwright, poet, writer, collector of folklore, and a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival. His best known play The Playboy of the Western World was poorly received, due to its bleak ending, depiction of Irish peasants, and idealisation of parricide, leading to hostile audience reactions and riots in Dublin during its opening run at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, which he had co-founded with W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory.


    His writings mainly concern working-class Catholics in rural Ireland, and with what he saw as the essential paganism of their world view. Owing to his ill health, Synge was schooled at home. His early interest was in music, leading to a scholarship and degree at Trinity College Dublin, and he went to Germany in 1893 to study music. He abandoned this career path in 1894 with a move to Paris where he took up poetry and literary criticism and met Yeats, and then returned to Ireland.


    Synge suffered from Hodgkin's disease. He died aged 37 from Hodgkin's-related cancer, while writing what became Deirdre of the Sorrows, considered by some as his masterpiece, though unfinished during his lifetime. Although he left relatively few works, they are widely regarded as of high cultural significance.


    *Any views/ideas expressed in these plays are not my own, and I do not believe in the censoring of anything controversial or problematic that the playwright/poet/author has written which will impact the way in which the story is told. The integrity of these works is much more important to me than any triggering content, and therefore I would ask that you have the same maturity and mental framework to listen to these pieces of art and appreciate them in their proper historical context.*

    28 min
  • J.M. Synge: Riders to the Sea

    Riders to the Sea & Shadow of the Glen are both one act plays by J.M. Synge, an Irish playwright in the early 20th Century who made it his life's mission to accurately depict the people of the Irish Countryside.

    Riders to the Sea is a Tragedy in One Act about a mother and her daughters dealing with a familial curse that seems to cause all of the men in the family to die. Anxieties come to a peak when the last, remaining son is getting ready to ride out to sea in order to try and provide for his family.

    Shadow of the Glen is a contemplative Drama in One Act about how a women's integrity can be unjustly scrutinized through hearsay and speculation, and how forcing those opinions out into the open can have disastrous consequences for everyone involved.


    Follow me on other platforms:

    https://bemuse.bandcamp.com

    https://www.instagram.com/talentunlimited1/?hl=en

    https://open.spotify.com/artist/0wiNjFbd6rluEHZF4Qffcv

    https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100070481824821&locale=hi_IN

    https://www.patreon.com/bemuse

    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLZ_sUa8kfdu3qa6GSzbDiw


    Website: https://bemusearts.com


    *This Season's Album Art by Brian Fisher*


    Edmund John Millington Synge (1871–1909) was an Irish playwright, poet, writer, collector of folklore, and a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival. His best known play The Playboy of the Western World was poorly received, due to its bleak ending, depiction of Irish peasants, and idealisation of parricide, leading to hostile audience reactions and riots in Dublin during its opening run at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, which he had co-founded with W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory.


    His writings mainly concern working-class Catholics in rural Ireland, and with what he saw as the essential paganism of their world view. Owing to his ill health, Synge was schooled at home. His early interest was in music, leading to a scholarship and degree at Trinity College Dublin, and he went to Germany in 1893 to study music. He abandoned this career path in 1894 with a move to Paris where he took up poetry and literary criticism and met Yeats, and then returned to Ireland.


    Synge suffered from Hodgkin's disease. He died aged 37 from Hodgkin's-related cancer, while writing what became Deirdre of the Sorrows, considered by some as his masterpiece, though unfinished during his lifetime. Although he left relatively few works, they are widely regarded as of high cultural significance.


    *Any views/ideas expressed in these plays are not my own, and I do not believe in the censoring of anything controversial or problematic that the playwright/poet/author has written which will impact the way in which the story is told. The integrity of these works is much more important to me than any triggering content, and therefore I would ask that you have the same maturity and mental framework to listen to these pieces of art and appreciate them in their proper historical context.*

    23 min
  • Oscar Wilde: Salome, Pt. 2

    Come join me in reading the one of Oscar Wilde's only tragedies, based on one of the most notorious recollections of the Bible. A story of gruesome ends for gruesome desires that shocked many of the theater goers in the late 1800's.

    Salome, the daughter of Herodious, has become smitten with John the Baptist due to him rebuking her advances. This causes her to desire him and only him. ... Even unto death. ... His Death.

    Come listen to the play that was the inspiration for the opera of the same name written by Richard Strauss, and one of the very first embodiment of the femme fatale... if given in a different context.


    Follow me on other platforms:

    https://bemuse.bandcamp.com

    https://www.instagram.com/talentunlimited1/?hl=en

    https://open.spotify.com/artist/0wiNjFbd6rluEHZF4Qffcv

    https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100070481824821&locale=hi_IN

    https://www.patreon.com/bemuse

    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLZ_sUa8kfdu3qa6GSzbDiw


    Website: https://bemusearts.com


    *This Season's Album Art by Brian Fisher*


    Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde (1854–1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts in "one of the first celebrity trials", imprisonment, and early death from meningitis at the age of 46.


    *Any views/ideas expressed in these plays are not my own, and I do not believe in the censoring of anything controversial or problematic that the playwright/poet/author has written which will impact the way in which the story is told. The integrity of these works is much more important to me than any triggering content, and therefore I would ask that you have the same maturity and mental framework to listen to these pieces of art and appreciate them in their proper historical context.*

    30 min
  • Oscar Wilde: Salome, Pt. 1

    Come join me in reading the one of Oscar Wilde's only tragedies, based on one of the most notorious recollections of the Bible. A story of gruesome ends for gruesome desires that shocked many of the theater goers in the late 1800's.

    Salome, the daughter of Herodious, has become smitten with John the Baptist due to him rebuking her advances. This causes her to desire him and only him. ... Even unto death. ... His Death.

    Come listen to the play that was the inspiration for the opera of the same name written by Richard Strauss, and one of the very first embodiment of the femme fatale... if given in a different context.


    Follow me on other platforms:

    https://bemuse.bandcamp.com

    https://www.instagram.com/talentunlimited1/?hl=en

    https://open.spotify.com/artist/0wiNjFbd6rluEHZF4Qffcv

    https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100070481824821&locale=hi_IN

    https://www.patreon.com/bemuse

    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLZ_sUa8kfdu3qa6GSzbDiw


    Website: https://bemusearts.com


    *This Season's Album Art by Brian Fisher*


    Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde (1854–1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts in "one of the first celebrity trials", imprisonment, and early death from meningitis at the age of 46.


    *Any views/ideas expressed in these plays are not my own, and I do not believe in the censoring of anything controversial or problematic that the playwright/poet/author has written which will impact the way in which the story is told. The integrity of these works is much more important to me than any triggering content, and therefore I would ask that you have the same maturity and mental framework to listen to these pieces of art and appreciate them in their proper historical context.*

    36 min
  • J.M. Synge: The Tinker's Wedding, Act II

    Come join me in the hilarious romp that is The Tinker's Wedding by J.M. Synge, a story of two young tinkers trying to con a travelling holy man into marrying them, all while their mother is constantly trying to satiate her indomitable thirst for drink, thereby inadvertently causing more problems than the drink is worth. Blaming, miscommunication, and utter tomfoolery ensues, leading to the final culmination of each party getting ready to pounce on each other's necks and outrageously strangle each other Saturday-morning-cartoon style. Come witness both sincerity and hilarity being wrapped up in this tight but brilliantly crafted two act drama-comedy.


    Follow me on other platforms:

    https://bemuse.bandcamp.com

    https://www.instagram.com/talentunlimited1/?hl=en

    https://open.spotify.com/artist/0wiNjFbd6rluEHZF4Qffcv

    https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100070481824821&locale=hi_IN

    https://www.patreon.com/bemuse

    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLZ_sUa8kfdu3qa6GSzbDiw


    Website: https://bemusearts.com


    *This Season's Album Art by Brian Fisher*


    Edmund John Millington Synge (1871–1909) was an Irish playwright, poet, writer, collector of folklore, and a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival. His best known play The Playboy of the Western World was poorly received, due to its bleak ending, depiction of Irish peasants, and idealisation of parricide, leading to hostile audience reactions and riots in Dublin during its opening run at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, which he had co-founded with W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory.


    His writings mainly concern working-class Catholics in rural Ireland, and with what he saw as the essential paganism of their world view. Owing to his ill health, Synge was schooled at home. His early interest was in music, leading to a scholarship and degree at Trinity College Dublin, and he went to Germany in 1893 to study music. He abandoned this career path in 1894 with a move to Paris where he took up poetry and literary criticism and met Yeats, and then returned to Ireland.


    Synge suffered from Hodgkin's disease. He died aged 37 from Hodgkin's-related cancer, while writing what became Deirdre of the Sorrows, considered by some as his masterpiece, though unfinished during his lifetime. Although he left relatively few works, they are widely regarded as of high cultural significance.


    *Any views/ideas expressed in these plays are not my own, and I do not believe in the censoring of anything controversial or problematic that the playwright/poet/author has written which will impact the way in which the story is told. The integrity of these works is much more important to me than any triggering content, and therefore I would ask that you have the same maturity and mental framework to listen to these pieces of art and appreciate them in their proper historical context.*

    20 min
  • J.M. Synge: The Tinker's Wedding, Act I

    Come join me in the hilarious romp that is The Tinker's Wedding by J.M. Synge, a story of two young tinkers trying to con a travelling holy man into marrying them, all while their mother is constantly trying to satiate her indomitable thirst for drink, thereby inadvertently causing more problems than the drink is worth. Blaming, miscommunication, and utter tomfoolery ensues, leading to the final culmination of each party getting ready to pounce on each other's necks and outrageously strangle each other Saturday-morning-cartoon style. Come witness both sincerity and hilarity being wrapped up in this tight but brilliantly crafted two act drama-comedy.


    Follow me on other platforms:

    https://bemuse.bandcamp.com

    https://www.instagram.com/talentunlimited1/?hl=en

    https://open.spotify.com/artist/0wiNjFbd6rluEHZF4Qffcv

    https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100070481824821&locale=hi_IN

    https://www.patreon.com/bemuse

    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLZ_sUa8kfdu3qa6GSzbDiw


    Website: https://bemusearts.com


    *This Season's Album Art by Brian Fisher*


    Edmund John Millington Synge (1871–1909) was an Irish playwright, poet, writer, collector of folklore, and a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival. His best known play The Playboy of the Western World was poorly received, due to its bleak ending, depiction of Irish peasants, and idealisation of parricide, leading to hostile audience reactions and riots in Dublin during its opening run at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, which he had co-founded with W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory.


    His writings mainly concern working-class Catholics in rural Ireland, and with what he saw as the essential paganism of their world view. Owing to his ill health, Synge was schooled at home. His early interest was in music, leading to a scholarship and degree at Trinity College Dublin, and he went to Germany in 1893 to study music. He abandoned this career path in 1894 with a move to Paris where he took up poetry and literary criticism and met Yeats, and then returned to Ireland.


    Synge suffered from Hodgkin's disease. He died aged 37 from Hodgkin's-related cancer, while writing what became Deirdre of the Sorrows, considered by some as his masterpiece, though unfinished during his lifetime. Although he left relatively few works, they are widely regarded as of high cultural significance.


    *Any views/ideas expressed in these plays are not my own, and I do not believe in the censoring of anything controversial or problematic that the playwright/poet/author has written which will impact the way in which the story is told. The integrity of these works is much more important to me than any triggering content, and therefore I would ask that you have the same maturity and mental framework to listen to these pieces of art and appreciate them in their proper historical context.*

    23 min

About Brendan Moir's Playwright Corner

From the publisher's feed

Welcome to Brendan Moir's Playwright Corner, where I read plays, poems, or whatever's currently striking my fancy in the classic audio book format. Prepare to be filled with joy, hope, rage, envy,…