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This month John Mullan is looking at Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. Week one: imaginary dialogue.

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Classics corner: Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

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One of the best novels ever written about the difficult but necessary work of finding out who one really is, says Edward Marriott

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Can a parent a love their children too much? Is it unwise to project all aspirations onto their futures? These are the questions which hover troublingly over Things We Know to Be True, a poetic and deeply poignant play from Andrew Bovell, the Australian writer best known for the film Lantana, adapted from his own play Speaking in Tongues, and for co-writing Strictly Ballroom with Baz Luhrmann.

In a suburb of Adelaide, working-class couple, Bob (Ewan Stewart) and Fran (Cate Hamer), have scrimped and saved all their lives to give their four children the things that they never had. Now, the brood have all achieved a degree of success born of too much choice. Tough Pip (Seline Hizli) has a high-powered job in educational strategy, sensitive Mark (Matthew Barker) is an IT specialist, brash Ben (Arthur Wilson) makes pots of money from the financial sector (his gift to his parents of a Nespresso machine is an unseen sign of bourgeois intrusion), and adored youngest child Rosie (Kirsty Oswald) is in the middle of an extended gap year. Each is unhappy in their own way.

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Things I Know to Be True: an articulate, poetic and poignant drama about the family circle, Lyric Hammersmith - review

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Can a parent a love their children too much?

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Andrew Bovell seems to have been writing Things I Know To Be True with Tolstoy's words lodged firmly in his subconscious. His incredibly crafted play introduces us to the Price family and the many subtleties of their particular unhappiness.

The first, and most lasting, impression we get from them is how much they love each other. How incredibly much they just love each other. And as we move through the play, receiving emotional blow after blow, hearing secrets and becoming the character's confidants we begin to ask a question we never thought we would ever ask. Can family love each other too much?

Frantic Assembly is a joy to watch. Their choreography is a melding of chaos and style. Chairs, tables and boxes glide across the stage connecting perfectly with their necessary spot, seeming to barely touch the floor. The physical blocking and scene changes were so interwoven they felt integral to the narrative, rather than a means to the next scene.

The actors were powerfully suited to their roles, though unfortunately John McArdle had to withdraw due to ill health. Ewan Stewart stepped in to reprise the role of Bob Price, and he steps into it seamlessly. Stewart is calm, kind and loving .Yet he lives in a fixed point in time, unable to change and adapt to his children's real lives.

The youngest child, Rosie, drives the majority of the action. She narrates and manoeuvres with a quiet strength, whilst still appearing vulnerable and lost. Kirsty Oswald plays Rosie expertly, both showing her nativity and unworldliness but never straying into silly or spoiled territory.

Pip and her mother Fran are two sides of the same coin. Seline Hizli and Cate Hamer clash and compete with a biting verve, but we never doubt the depth of their bond or the strength of their feeling for each other. Ben, played by Arthur Wilson, is an energetic, recognisable character. His descent is so frightening to watch because it is so painfully easy to see coming, but so impossible to stop from happening.

Mark is perhaps the most unknowable character. The other children have emotionally charged monologues that expose the cracks in their life, hinting at the troubles to come. This allowed the audience to form a deeper connection with them. I struggled to feel that with Mark, and it was only in his last scene that I caught a glimpse into his true struggle and inner turmoil.

Things I Know To Be True troubled me, it shook me and it moved me. I found their particular situations totally foreign and yet their story is universal. It was beautiful and angering and won't fail to elicit an emotional response in every single audience member.

Things I Know To Be True is playing the Lyric Hammersmith until 3 February. For more information and tickets, see lyric.co.uk/shows/things-i-know-to-be-true.

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Review: Things I Know to be True, Lyric Hammersmith

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Review of Andrew Bovell's play of unhappiness and family love, Things I Know to be True. Playing the Lyric Hammersmith until 3rd February.

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As children move into adulthood their lives splinter away from the family home, from the childhood suburb, from the cities they found their feet in. There is an acuteness to this in cities like Adelaide: small, geographically isolated, the bright lights of the east coast ever beckoning. There is an acuteness to this in countries like Australia: small, geographically isolated, the ancient streets of Europe calling from across the seas.

The splintering is happening to the Price family, piece by piece. The car manufacturing industry deserted them first. Rosie (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), their youngest, ran away the furthest - backpacking through Europe - but now she is back too soon, and so something must be wrong. From here, the splintering of the family will only grow.

But in this moment, in the house at Hallett Cove in Andrew Bovell's Things I Know To Be True, the Price family home can be the whole world. While Bovell's characters look forever elsewhere in his play, he grounds it in suburban domesticity: there is coffee to be brewed, onions to be cut, rose bushes to be trimmed. Geoff Cobham's set grows over the course of the play: he has stripped everything back so the wide stage reveals the physical walls of the theatre, and as our understanding of the family comes together, the family garden comes together, too.

This first-time collaboration between the State Theatre Company of South Australia and the UK's Frantic Assembly melds an Australian sensibility of storytelling with the styling of contemporary British theatre. The international collaboration, which will re-rehearse with a British cast before a UK tour at the end of this year, is an audacious step for the STCSA that pays off in a beautiful story grounded in Adelaide, but looking towards the world.

Directors Geordie Brookman and Scott Graham spread tenderness throughout the production, delicately folding us through the family drama. We watch people hurt each other; we feel this hurt. And yet this tenderness remains, always.

Nils Frahm's composition gently rolls us through the months, scoring Frantic Assembly's trademark physicality. As the actors talk in monologues they physically embody emotion and connection to the family: bodies are passed between hands and over heads; they're gently embraced, and let go. Or else, the words give way: wordless monologues told through movement of hope, and of pain. In other scenes, Brookman and Graham take away this movement and force us to sit, reeling, in the naturalism. Frahm's composition leaves us, and surrounding the words all we can do is drown in the depths of the silence.

Frantic Assembly's 'trademark physicality' at work in Things I Know To Be True Photograph: Shane Reid

The cast, if not always grasping the precise flow of the movement, operate as an affecting and strong unit. But it is Rosie who the play leans on. The child who was unplanned, the not-quite an adult, the observer of the family: much rests on Cobham-Hervey's silence on the vast stage. She, like us, is the outsider in this family of grown-ups, and her performance is both fragile and stoic.

Things I Know To Be True is a snapshot of life, and like life it comes with countless themes. Audiences will pull out different strands and different stories to focus on. But ultimately beating its way steadily through the work is the low-level fears we all must live with: that we love too much, or that we don't love enough; and that one day we will have to say goodbye.

Things I Know To Be True is at the Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide, until 4 June, before showing in Canberra 8-11 June. It is touring the UK from 10 September

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Things I Know To Be True review - powerful debut of Andrew Bovell's affecting new play

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A collaboration between Australia and the UK, the family drama is tender, physical and deeply relatable - set in Adelaide, but looking towards the world

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Here are the mark schemes for both task 1 and task 2. Familiarize yourself with the assessment objectives and level descriptors.

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The speaker of 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' is trapped in his own mind, so full of hesitation and doubt that he is unable to act. Seamus Perry explores the poem's portrayal of paralysing anxiety.

Who is Prufrock?

T S Eliot wrote this poem while he was in his early twenties: he later recalled beginning the poem while a student of philosophy at Harvard University in 1909-10, and he finished it while travelling for a year in Europe, in Munich and Paris. But you could not say that it was a young man's poem exactly: later in life Eliot, when asked, said: 'It was partly a dramatic creation of a man of about 40 I should say, and partly an expression of feeling of my own through this dim imaginary figure.' The poem is extraordinarily original, but it does have some anticipations. Of all the poets of the Victorian period, Eliot later remarked, the only one 'whom our contemporary can study with much profit is Browning': that is Robert Browning (1812-1889), who was famous for writing poems as monologues in the voices of assumed personae. Eliot's poem is not very much like a Browning poem, but it does grow from the example of his dramatic practice: it is through inventing a prematurely middle-aged persona, as he came to see it in retrospect at least, that Eliot found a way of articulating something about himself.

He once referred to that thing, in private, as a 'complex'. Presumably with some degree of levity, given the nature of the authority upon which he was commenting, Eliot wrote 'The Prufrock Complex' next to these words from the report of a palm-reader: 'when faced with a personal problem, any prolonged contemplation of probabilities merely produces hesitancy and indecision'. Prufrock is one of the great inventions of the modern literary imagination: he has become an archetype for the 'complex' of over-scrupulous timidity. He is a man paralysed by an overwhelming anxiety about the possibility of getting things wrong: his judgement has such nicety and fastidiousness that it never arrives at decision, let alone action. So there is, as it transpires, a certain irony in the manner in which the poem opens:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table ...

The language of the opening line is decisiveness itself, and involves a determination to get going, along with a firm address to another person; but the sense of purpose is quickly dissipated as the speaker becomes absorbed in a lyrical evocation of the light effects of dusk, which in turn then gets waylaid by the sheer oddity of the simile that seems to come, unsolicited, to his mind to describe them. The play between the belated romanticism of an evening 'spread out against the sky' and the incongruous modernity of 'a patient etherised upon a table' purposefully sets different sorts of world in juxtaposition: the poetical and the medical, the lyrical and the hospital; and this juxtapositional method will be the main way the poem gets to work. The title of the poem announces that method as it braces the romance of 'The Love Song' against the precise social formality of 'J. Alfred Prufrock'. Eliot said later in life that he chose the name because it sounded 'very very prosaic', though it probably sounds more eccentric than prosaic to most readers, even a bit of a joke name; but Browning offered examples of characters with bizarre or even cartoonish names (Bishop Blougram, Mr Sludge, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau) who revealed within their poems a seriousness of predicament that we might not have expected to find. Eliot begins his poem with what is by any standards a linguistic misjudgement and might seem just a comic stroke - to include of all things a pronominal initial in the name, as one might on an official form, in the title of a love poem; but he then goes on in his portrait of indecisiveness to make the fallibilities of such uncertain judgement seem terrible as well as comical. 'No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be', Prufrock announces towards the end of his poem, distancing himself from the character in literature who has most often (rightly or wrongly) been seen as making dithering about a decision the source of great tragedy. Prufrock's experience of the 'overwhelming question' falls short of that kind of grandeur.

Prufrock, and other observations by T S Eliot

Front cover to T S Eliot's Prufrock, and other observations published by The Egoist in 1917.

Usage terms © Estate of T. S. Eliot. You may not use the material for commercial purposes. Please credit the copyright holder when reusing this work.

Going nowhere

'Let us go', Prufrock repeats, and again, 'Let us go'; but the movements of the poetry have already established by the end of the first verse that we are occupying a consciousness that is destined to go nowhere very much. And in fact the epigraph to the poem, which comes from Dante's Divine Comedy, has already introduced the idea of going nowhere as a key theme in the poem's orchestration. (It is from Canto 27 of the Inferno.) In the passage, Dante, who is touring Hell, has begun to converse with one of the inhabitants, Guido da Montefeltro, who is initially reluctant to respond; but on the reasonable assumption that Dante must be in Hell for all eternity too, he begins to speak:

If I thought my answer were to one who ever could return to the world, this flame should shake no more; but since none ever did return alive from this depth, if what I hear be true, without fear of infamy I answer thee.

For Eliot to begin his poem with a voice from the depths of Hell is to create another of the poem's formative juxtapositions, and invites the reader to make out a connection: the world of the poem is nothing to do with medieval Catholicism, but rather genteel New England society - a place of tea cups and coffee spoons, collar pins and neckties, musical soirées and perfumed evening dresses - but conceivably another version of Hell for all that. The inescapability of social conventions and the stifling prescriptions of polite decorum constitute a new kind of infernal entrapment.

For Hell is a place you don't leave: Dante was unusual in coming back to tell the tale. The opening urgency of Prufrock's 'Let us go' dwindles in the short second verse to the desultory-sounding to-and-fro of the unidentified women, who 'come and go / Talking of Michelangelo'. That couplet also comes and goes, returning about 20 lines later, but with no improved sense as to who the women are, let alone what they mean to the speaker. Like the cat-like fog that rubs itself lazily upon the cityscape, the poem curls about and about, its beautifully drifting, self-interrupting sentences repeatedly putting off the moment of coming to a full stop. Often, instead, they come to a question mark: 'Do I dare / Disturb the universe?' It would be wrong to say that these questions are 'rhetorical'; they are genuinely expressions of perplexity: 'So how should I presume?'

The form of the verse co-operates in this universe of non-ending by avoiding the different sorts of progressiveness that would come from using stanzas, or blank verse, or heroic couplets. Eliot's poem has no regular rhyme or rhythmical patterning: it is in free verse, vers libre, though the effect here is anything but a launch into untrammelled freedom, as some of the proponents of vers libre at the beginning of the 20th century liked to claim. ' Vers libre', wrote Eliot in 1917, the year that 'Prufrock' was published in the volume Prufrock and Other Observations, 'is a battle-cry of freedom, and there is no freedom in art.' Vers libre involves abandoning the 'comforting echo of rhyme', he said; but his poem does not do without rhyme at all, just without regular rhyme, as in a rhyme scheme. Eliot wrote beautifully about the possibilities of this, as though in oblique commentary on his own poem: 'There are often passages in an unrhymed poem where rhyme is wanted for some special effect, for a sudden tightening-up, for a cumulative insistence, or for an abrupt change of mood.' You could find examples of all of those in the poem, and other effects besides, created by rhyme's interruption into an unrhymed or unpredictably rhymed space: 'Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, / Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?'

Eliot is drawn, too, to leaving Prufrock caught up in rhymes that are no rhymes but merely repetitions, enacting the way he is victimised by the insistently reiterative movements of his own anxious mind - as, say, when he can't dislodge the accusation of being too 'thin':

(They will say: 'How his hair is growing thin!')
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin-
(They will say: 'But how his arms and legs are thin!')

Prufrock and the women

'They' are probably women: Prufrock's anxieties revolve partly around the imponderabilities of time, but chiefly around a fear of women, and a fretfulness about the humiliations of social encounter that rises here and there to a kind of suppressed hysteria: 'When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall ...'. In a Browning monologue there is usually an implied interlocutor (whom, of course, we do not hear) with whom the speaker is interacting in one way or another; but just to whom Prufrock is addressing himself is not so clear. The 'you' addressed in the first line seems to evaporate quite soon, as though he (is it a 'he'?) never were in real life; and the 'you' of 'you and me' that comes later - 'here beside you and me' and 'some talk of you and me' - does not feel like the same addressee, or indeed an addressee who is really present at all. Prufrock is talking to a 'you' inside his own mind, and she is a part of some back-story to the poem's frustrated erotic life which is kept almost entirely under wraps. The poem has moments of rich sexual response and, as though not knowing what to do with them, they no sooner arise than they are diverted into the sidelines of a bracket or an aside: 'Arms that are braceleted and white and bare / (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)' The closest we come to disclosure is the studiedly neutral double reference to 'one': 'one, settling a pillow by her head', and again, 'one settling a pillow, or throwing off a shawl'. In his portrait of this 'one', she appears unimpressed by his efforts to 'say just what I mean'; but he is using her imagined indifference as a reason for abandoning an effort in the first place.

'"Prufrock and other Observations": A Criticism' by May Sinclair, from the Little Review

In her review of Prufrock and other Observations May Sinclair addresses how T S Eliot's poetry challenged conventional public taste.

Usage terms Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London
on behalf of The Beneficiaries of the Estate of May Sinclair
Copyright © May Sinclair 1917.
Except as otherwise permitted by your national copyright laws this material may not be copied or distributed further.

The poem comes to a close with Prufrock lapsing gratefully back into a lovely fantasy of 'sea-girls' singing their mermaid songs in the deeps: Prufrock eavesdrops upon them, momentarily at ease, it would seem, now that the fulfilment of his desire is completely out of the question. But the last line conveys that there is no escape from the poised chat over the tea cups: 'Till human voices wake us, and we drown.' The poem does not mock Prufrock's dreamy romanticism, which it voices very beautifully; and while it could hardly be called a resolute ending, it is the right one. The poem 'does not "go off at the end"', protested Ezra Pound, Eliot's friend and early champion, to an editor who had wanted something more: 'It is a portrait of failure, or of a character who fails, and it would be false art to make it end on a note of triumph.'

Footnotes

For more T S Eliot content explore works published by Faber & Faber.

Seamus Perry is a Fellow of Balliol College and an Associate Professor in the English Faculty, University of Oxford. He is the author of books and articles about, among others, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, T S Eliot, and W H Auden.

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a close reading of 'the love song of j. alfred prufrock'

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A close reading of 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'

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The speaker of 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' is trapped in his own mind, so full of hesitation and doubt that he is unable to act. Seamus Perry explores the poem's portrayal of paralysing anxiety.

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This link will take you to the MASSOLit website where there are plenty of videos and clips about Modernism and Eliot's poetry. Remember - you can use these as critics in your coursework.

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In this course, Professor Max Saunders (King's College, London) explores some classic works of modernist literature. We begin with a discussion of Henry James' What Maisie Knew in module one, focussing in particular on James' narrative ...

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TS Eliot's The Waste Land remains one of the finest reflections on mental illness ever written

Jonathan McAloon

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TS Eliot's The Waste Land remains one of the finest reflections on mental illness ever written

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The poet's modernist masterpiece gathered fragments of an arduous life, some of which can be traced to a seafront shelter in Margate

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The full text and some analysis of The Wasteland