The Illusion of Depth

If you're a Christian, you might know "The Feast of Stephen" as St. Stephen's Day (the 26th of December) when young men dress up in vaguely nightmarish straw costumes and wander around the town playing alarming music while carrying a dead bird. This is not about that. If you're a Doctor Who fan, you might know The Feast of Stephen as the first ever Doctor Who Christmas episode (broadcast on Christmas Day in 1965).  This is not about that either. For our purposes this week, The Feast of Stephen  concerns a small but pivotal character in the beloved Noël Coward/David Lean classic Brief Encounter .  Brief Encounter is remembered today as perhaps the most famous unconsummated love affair in cinema history. Released in 1945 (but without so much as the slightest hint of a war or its effects) it tells the story of two (married) individuals who meet by chance on a train platform and proceed to teeter on the brink of having an affair for a few weeks. They do not, in fac...

The Winter's Tale is not Shakespeare's most famous play. It doesn't have a balcony scene, and no one gets turned into a donkey. There are no introspective graveyard scenes with human skulls, and no one, at any point, longs for a horse at any price. But The Winter's Tale secures its position in the Shakespearian canon for at least one reason. It features what is beyond a shadow of doubt the most exciting, nerve-tingling, action-packed edge-of-your-seat, adrenaline-pumping Stage Direction in the history of theatre. ANTIGONUS Come, poor babe: I have heard, but not believed, the spirits o' the dead May walk again: if such thing be, thy mother Appear'd to me last night, for ne'er was dream So like a waking. To me comes a creature, Sometimes her head on one side, some another; I never saw a vessel of like sorrow, So fill'd and so becoming: in pure white robes, Like very sanctity, she did approach My cabin where I lay; thrice bow'd before me, And gasping...